Soldiers do dirty work for talkers

Updated 3:33 pm, Monday, June 16, 2014

SAN ANTONIO — Afghanistan, 2012. He fired the AK-47 from my left at point-blank range. My biggest fear. But it happened too fast for me to be scared. I felt the burn before I heard the bang.

England, 1651. “And covenants, without the sword, are but words.”

So wrote Thomas Hobbes, one of modernity's founders and 11 generations later, too few moderns have learned this fundamental Hobbesian lesson.

Hobbes believed that unenforceable agreements are foolish, impracticable and, in fact, not agreements at all. The law is not what someone says it is but, rather, what someone — let us call him or her a sheriff — can and will enforce.

Hobbes' sheriff was leviathan, an absolute, monopolistic, sovereign power created to “over-awe” all comers. Globally, today our sheriff is international law or human rights or the United Nations. But when President Barack Obama stomps his feet over Syrian gas, or the first lady takes to the airwaves to commiserate publicly with kidnapped children, or Prime Minister Stephen Harper sends Canadian election observers to Ukraine, or George Clooney serves as a UN messenger of peace, is anyone, it is fair to ask, over-awed?

Hobbes thought we needed a sheriff because we are afraid, because all life is fear, because there is no end to fear this side of the grave. His biggest fear was that his neighbors would kick in his door and cut his throat in the middle of the night.

Today we think we need a sheriff because we are afraid, because all life is fear, because there is no end to fear this side of the grave. Our biggest fear is Bashar al-Assad exterminating his people, or Boko Haram stealing girls from their schools and homes, or Vladimir Putin sending masked gunmen across international borders or terrorists hijacking our planes and flying them into our buildings.

Hobbes called his biggest fear civil war, a return to the state of nature. We call ours terrorism, or genocide, or breaking international law, or committing war crimes, or violating human rights.

No matter what Hobbes called it or we call it, the Hobbesian question remains: What is our sheriff doing about it? Stomping his feet, taking to the airwaves, sending election observers, messengering for peace. Translation: Nothing.

Or sometimes our wannabe sheriff descends from on high, takes off his gloves, holds his nose and dances with the devil. He makes difficult, ambiguous, nation-imperiling decisions, such as trading five murderous terrorists for a lone American soldier who deserted his post, his comrades and his country while at war.

But when agreements are unenforceable (or nonexistent) because sheriffs have no swords, this is how the world works. Hobbes understood this short, nasty, brutish fact 31/2 centuries ago. Somehow, we still do not.

So you cosmopolitan elites who are reading these words, and you talk-radio radicals who are not reading these words, remember that America's over-awers are not presidents or first ladies or professors or activists or actors; not generals, neocons, businessmen, pundits or politicians. Our sheriffs always have been and always will be teenagers and twenty-somethings with crooked teeth, tattoos and GEDs.

When international law needs enforcing or human rights need vindicating, when wrongs need righting or mom, the flag, and apple pie need protecting, they carry the swords.

They get burned.

And you just talk about it.

Cory Isaacs is a former San Antonio police officer and a lawyer. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 2010 and became an infantryman, serving from 2010 to 2014. He was deployed to Afghanistan from December 2011 to November 2012.